Buying The Virgin Part 1-3 novel Chapter 140

Book Name: Buying the Virgin

Author: Simone Leigh

1.How has your life changed in particular since becoming the author of Hinovel?

I’ve been a writer for some years now, telling my stories by the ‘traditional’ publication method of e-books. I always enjoyed this. I love what I do.

However, when I first started out telling my steamy stories, like ‘Buying the Virgin’, I assumed that my readers would be the ‘Fifty Shades’ audience. To my surprise, over time I realised that my readers were, as you would expect, mainly women, but mainly they were much older than I expected. The age demographic was mainly 50+. I don’t mind this. It was just a surprise.

One thing that was lovely about this is that I regularly get messages from readers saying things like, ‘I’m too old to enjoy sex properly, but reading your stories helps.’

This is one message I received, copied in full (by permission of the lady who sent it to me). This message made me cry when I first read it. I have other, similar ones.

Thank you so very much for the great books, I have never been a reader until I came across one of your books. I couldn’t put it down until I finish it, and then I downloaded every book you wrote, read them over and over until you released another.

My friend and I use to read them together while we were going though chemo, but we lost her to lung cancer last year so I’m carrying on for her. So, as I said earlier thank you so very much for the great reads.

Then, along came Hinovel. Because it is a phone app, the readers are a much younger demographic. I have an entirely new audience to enjoy my stories.

Now I get messages like this. ‘I read your story to my boyfriend. Now he gets it.’

Or…

‘I wanted a romantic night in. Me and the boyfriend read your story together. It had a really good result.’

Messages like that make me smile and laugh.

2.What was the inspiration for this book? What circumstances made you start writing this book?

‘Buying the Virgin’ was almost the first thing I wrote in this genre (the first was ‘Bought By The Billionaire’). It was originally intended to be just a quick-flash read: a series of short stories covering a week of fun-and-frolics auction erotica. Throw all the legs in the air and divide by two (or in this case, three). That kind of story.

After I’d written about Charlotte’s first week with James and Michael, I received a lot of requests for ‘More Charlotte!’ So, I wrote more stories, again not intended to be more than a fun read, about Charlotte’s first Christmas with her Master and her Lover, then Valentine’s day, and so on.

And still, I was getting requests for more.

Except that by now, the personalities of the characters were asserting themselves. The depth of the bond between Charlotte and her Master was becoming clear. And, since Michael was in love with her, how would he react?

As I arrived at writing ‘The Virgin’s Master’, it was dawning on me that I had a real saga on my hands; one in which I needed to develop the characters, explore their motivations, think about ‘What If?’

The motivations were particularly important because, although the story is, at root, a romantic fantasy, nothing happens that couldn’t actually happen out there in the real world, to real people.

So, I came to ‘The Virgin’s Summer’. And this time, instead of writing short stories piecemeal, and making it up as I went along, I had a plan; a plan that would account for Why Charlotte chose to sell herself in the way she did. Why she was so hell-bent on going to university? Why is she attracted to two such dissimilar men?

And because I had already set James up as an engineer (The Virgin’s Lover) – which I did because I was originally an engineer myself, so I know what I’m talking about – I needed to give him a job and a setting. He needed to work for someone.

Lo and behold – I didn’t have to invent any of that. I already had a handy property-developing billionaire on tap. Enter Richard Haswell of ‘Bought by the Billionaire’ to the story. So, I had a City, a background and a setting.

So, we move on – in ‘The Virgin’s Summer’: Charlotte’s background comes out; her history of being somehow trafficked/kidnapped/stolen as a child, the information that she has an enemy, Klempner, who holds some kind of grudge against her…